America’s gayest ZIP codes, in two tables

In honor of Pride month, Trulia has singled out the neighborhoods with the highest percentage of same-sex households, based on data from the 2010 U.S. Census. Overall, only 0.6 percent of the country’s households are same-sex couples — about 646,000 overall — about evenly split between male and female couples. Trulia — an online real-estate sales site — has charted where they tend to live.
(Carol Tedesco - Associated Press)

Many of the neighborhoods are well-known gay meccas — San Francisco’s Castro, Provincetown, and Northampton, Mass. — but the list also includes suburban Detroit, suburban Atlanta, and a neighborhood in Dallas, Texas. (The sample doesn’t include single gay men and women, however, as the Census doesn’t ask about sexual orientation.) Here are the top neighborhoods for gay male couples:

(Trulia)

There’s some geographic overlap with the same-sex female households, but they generally tend to be concentrated elsewhere:

(Trulia)

Trulia chief economist Jed Kolko points out that same-sex male couples tend to live in more expensive neighborhoods than either lesbian couples or heterosexual couples. (Nationally, the average household’s price per square foot is is $127.) Kolko explains: “A big reason is that same-sex couples are less likely to have kids: 10 percent of same-sex male couples and 24 percent of same-sex female couples have kids in the house, compared with 41 percent of all married and unmarried couples.” Women also earn less than men in general. In addition, he points to academic research showing that gay men tend to contribute more to the gentrification of urban neighborhoods — sometimes directly increasing housing prices through remodeling San Francisco’s Victorian homes, for instance.

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